Fault tolerant target localization and tracking in binary WSNs using sensor health state estimation

Abstract

Tracking of a source (target) which is moving inside a binary Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a challenging problem particularly when sensors may fail either due to hardware and/or software malfunctions, energy depletion or adversary attacks. Using information from failed sensors to locate and track a target may lead to high estimation errors, therefore, there is a need to develop fault tolerant localization algorithms which perform well even when a percentage of the sensors report erroneous observations. Alternatively, one may fuse information from neighboring sensors in order to determine the health state of each sensor, and subsequently use only healthy sensors in the localization and tracking process. Our contribution is the development of an architecture which combines the sensor health state estimation together with fault tolerant localization algorithms that leads to more robust target tracking in binary WSNs. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach is resilient to various types of faults.